Wire guides are commonly used in vascular procedures, such as angioplasty procedures, diagnostic and interventional procedures, percutaneous access procedures, and radiological and neurological procedures. In general, wire guides may be used to introduce a wide variety of medical devices into the vascular system.
Generally, during each of the foregoing procedures, a wire guide is first inserted into a patient's vascular system and is then advanced toward a target site. Various wire guides comprise flexible distal regions to facilitate navigation through the tortuous anatomy of a patient's vasculature. Where such flexible distal regions are used, it may be difficult to insert a medical component over the wire guide because of the flexibility of the distal region. However, if the distal region is too stiff, then it may be too difficult to advance the wire guide to the target site.
In order to facilitate advancement of medical component to the target site, some medical procedures utilize two wire guides, a first flexible wire guide for initially traversing the vasculature, and then a stiffer wire guide is advanced over or along the side of the initial wire guide. Once the stiffer wire guide is in place, a catheter can then be advanced over the stiffer wire guide. This procedure works well, but requires three different components be advanced through the vasculature of the patient.
It would be beneficial to have a single component that could function as both a wire guide and a catheter, such that a single procedure could be used to guide a catheter to a target area. Such a component would need to be flexible to navigate the tortuous anatomy of a patient, yet would also need to be stiff to facilitate pushability of the component.